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IRSH 56 (2011), Special Issue, pp. 1–23 doi:10.1017/S0020859011000460r 2011 Internationaal Instituut voor Sociale Geschiedenis

The Joy and Pain of Work: Global Attitudes andValuations, 1500–1650

Introduction*

K A R I N H O F M E E S T E R

Internationaal Instituut voor Sociale Geschiedenis, Amsterdam

E-mail: [email protected]

C H R I S T I N E M O L L - M U R A T A

Ruhr-Universitat Bochum

E-mail: [email protected]

We can safely assume that from 1500 to 1650 much of the world’s populationworked to earn their living. Though we know roughly what kind of taskspeople performed, we know surprisingly little about their perception ofwork. This Special Issue aims to present the first inventory of its kind ofprevailing attitudes towards work and of how work was valued in what istermed for some, but not all, parts of the world the early modern period. Ouraim is inspired largely by a long-term project being conducted at the IISH:The Global Collaboratory on the History of Labour Relations, 1500–2000.That project endeavours to establish a quantitative overview of labour rela-tions worldwide for the period 1500 to 2000. Within the framework of that

* A workshop on ‘‘Work: Ethics, Norms, Valuations, Ideologies, 1500-1650’’ was held inDusseldorf in November 2009. The workshop was organized with the generous support of theGerda Henkel Stiftung, the sponsor of the 1500–1650 segment of the Global Collaboratory.This volume contains the results of our endeavours. In addition to the authors of the con-tributions included in this collection, the participants in the Collaboratory project and thespecialists in the field invited for this occasion were Josef Ehmer, who lectured on the socialconstruction of work in the early modern period, Touraj Atabaki, with a presentation on‘‘Work-Discipline in the Ottoman Empire/Turkey and Persia/Iran, 1800-1950’’, and Jun Seong-ho, who discussed ‘‘A Qualitative Aspect of Work Valuation in Confucian Korea, 1500–1650’’.Others who presented data were Jan Lucassen, Jose Miguel Lana Berasain, Jacques van Gerwen,Gijs Kessler, Dmitrij Khitrov, and Peter Forster; Erdem Kabadayı, Aad Blok, and Reza Jafariparticipated as observers. The editors express their thanks to the English language editor, ChrisGordon, and to the cartographer, Annelieke Vries-Baaijens, for their committed and reliablework on the articles presented here.

project the members of the Collaboratory collect data on labour relations forthe years 1500, 1650, 1800, 1900, and 2000, thereby enabling shifts in labourrelations to be identified. Those shifts and their interconnectedness willsubsequently be analysed and explained.

The early cross-section years – 1500 and 1650 – are part of a crucialperiod in which a polycentric world became globally interlinked by large-scale circulations of people, ideas, and commodities. Since demographicand occupational statistics for these years are based chiefly on roughestimates, a more qualitative approach to attitudes towards work and thevaluation of work in these periods is important for interpreting andunderstanding the statistical data and estimates collated. These attitudesand valuations differed from region to region and changed over time; suchchanges point to shifts in labour relations globally.

W O R K A N D I T S P E R C E P T I O N S I N H I S T O R I O G R A P H Y

In their recent volume The Idea of Work in Europe from Antiquity toModern Times, the editors Catharina Lis and Josef Ehmer observe thatlittle systematic work has been carried out on the development of workethics in pre-industrial Europe. As a consequence, a standard narrative –leaning heavily on Max Weber – of a linear development, from a workethic based on sixteenth-century Christian values to a work ethic rootedin capitalist culture and directed towards success, remains largely undis-puted.1 Such a perspective not only neglects variant views on work inearlier periods, it also lacks a differentiated linear narrative, which,moreover, remains too narrowly focused on the perspective of the ‘‘Riseof the West’’. In a critical overview of the literature on the influence ofChristian religion on work ethics, Lis and Ehmer explain that the idea of adistinct shift from the sixteenth century onward is misleading. They stressthe continuity of religious attitudes to work in both Catholicism andProtestantism, implying on the one hand that work meant pain and toil insuccession to Christ’s suffering, and on the other that manual work meantserving God and one’s community and was thus to be valued.2

Since the late Middle Ages, labour discourse became influenced bypolitical and social theories. The debate was no longer confined to monasticscholars, but was taken up by larger social groups. Lis and Ehmer explainthe reasons for this intensification of the discourse and the greater esteemattributed to work largely in terms of socio-economic change.3 They claim

1. Catharina Lis and Josef Ehmer, ‘‘Introduction: Historical Studies in Perceptions of Work’’, inJosef Ehmer and Catharina Lis (eds), The Idea of Work in Europe from Antiquity to ModernTimes (Farnham, 2009), pp. 1–30, 5–6, 8, and 9.2. Ibid., p. 16.3. Ibid., p. 18.

2 Karin Hofmeester and Christine Moll-Murata

that an increase in wage labour led to an increase in labour discourse.4 Lis andEhmer argue that the next major shift occurred in the seventeenth andeighteenth centuries, when the discourse on labour was disseminated evenmore widely and became influenced by philosophers.5 Work was now con-sidered ‘‘work for the nation’’, forming the foundation of ‘‘national wealth’’.In central Europe this was understood to mean working for the state.6

For the purpose of the Global Collaboratory, the explanation of theconnection between shifts in labour relations on the one hand and shifts inperceptions of work on the other is fundamental, and it is for this reasonthat the authors of this volume owe much in the way of inspiration to thebook edited by Ehmer and Lis. Other influential studies on the concept ofwork in European conceptual history can be traced to the impressivepioneering work of Herbert Applebaum, The Concept of Work: Ancient,Medieval, and Modern (Albany, NY, 1992), which described and analysedtrends and tendencies from antiquity to the industrial age.

In an earlier publication, the same author had already addressed the subjectof work from an anthropological perspective. His edited volume, Work inNon-Market and Transitional Societies collected essays on work organizationamong hunters and gatherers in pastoralist societies, among cultivators andgardeners in villages, and in cultures and societies where non-market andmarket-oriented work values underwent change and adaptation. These stu-dies discuss mostly contemporary, non-European cases. In his categorizationof work in non-market societies, Applebaum defines work as embedded inthe total cultural fabric, with strong communal aspects that involve mutualityand reciprocal exchange, aimed mostly at subsistence; furthermore, thatwork was not highly specialized, and was task-oriented rather than time-oriented.7 The transition from non-market to market societies is importantin this project as well, and many of the qualifications Applebaum made forthe present can be found in our contributions, especially the changing roleof reciprocity, the shift from task to time orientation, and the changingrelationships between women’s work and men’s work.

While Applebaum treated Europe and many non-European regions andcommunities separately, other historians have focused on both. Michel Cartier’sedited volume Le Travail et ses representations stands in the tradition ofMaurice Godelier,8 which has a strong anthropological and linguistic focus.The case studies in Cartier’s volume discuss extra-European communities

4. Ibid.5. Ibid., p. 19.6. Ibid., p. 20.7. Herbert Applebaum, ‘‘Theoretical Introduction’’, in idem (ed.), Work in Non-Market andTransitional Societies (Buffalo, NY, 1984), p. 2.8. Lis and Ehmer, ‘‘Introduction’’, p. 6, give an outline of Godelier’s initiative History Work-shop Journal, founded in 1980.

Joy and Pain of Work, 1500–1600: Introduction 3

from the eighteenth century to the present, with the exception of theeditor’s own field of research, China, for which he offered a perspectiveon work in antiquity.9

More recently, Jurgen Kocka and Manfred Bierwisch have separatelyedited collections of articles on the history of work.10 Both share aconcern with contemporary changes in work, the decrease in the dom-inance of wage labour, and the diminished long-term commitment on thepart of employers. Both collections link up to periods when dependentwage labour was not the norm, and they also look to extra-European regionsfor patterns of work organization that diverged from the western Europeancase. They do so for reasons of contrast in a situation where the West is incrisis rather than in the ascendant. As for the European historical experience,both continue to convey the standard narrative. In their introduction, JurgenKocka and Claus Offe stress various factors that promoted the rise ofcapitalism: Christianity, especially Protestant work ethics, the disciplineimposed on urban citizens, and the philosophy of the Enlightenment.11 Thenon-European cases they present, from India, Japan, Malaya, Africa, and theIslamic world, cover mostly the present and can also be understood ascontrasting with the European, or to be more precise, the German case.

The intention of these volumes is to explain the current occupationalcrisis in Europe and to offer suggestions for ‘‘therapy’’,12 or to propose anew orientation for the relationship between work and life.13 Bierwisch’scollection does not intend to provide new details, but to offer overviewsof work in European antiquity, work organization in twentieth-centuryindustrial Russia and its rural roots, conceptual aspects of work in Chinafrom antiquity to the present, work in Islam, and a case study of conceptionsof work in a present-day African rural community.14

As Lis and Ehmer have remarked, until now there has been no systematictreatment of perceptions of labour,15 which makes comparison over time andspace a complicated and risky undertaking. In view of this state of the field,

9. Michel Cartier, ‘‘Travail et ideologie dans la China antique’’, in idem (ed.), Le Travail et sesrepresentations (Paris, 1984), pp. 275–304.10. Jurgen Kocka and Claus Offe (eds), Geschichte und Zukunft der Arbeit (Frankfurt, 2000);Manfred Bierwisch (ed.), Die Rolle der Arbeit in verschiedenen Epochen und Kulturen (Berlin, 2003).11. Jurgen Kocka and Claus Offe, in idem, Geschichte und Zukunft der Arbeit, p. 20.12. Idem, Geschichte und Zukunft der Arbeit, section ‘‘Beschaftigungskrise in Europa:Konkurrierende Erklarungen und Therapieangebote’’.13. Manfred Bierwisch, ‘‘Arbeit in verschiedenen Epochen und Kulturen – EinleitendeBemerkungen’’, in idem, Die Rolle der Arbeit, p. 16.14. Georg Elwert, ‘‘Wissen, Freude und Schmerzen. Uber Arbeit in einer afrikanischenGesellschaft’’, in Bierwisch, Die Rolle der Arbeit, pp. 153–172. Elwert presents the samethought-provoking case in ‘‘Jede Arbeit hat ihr Alter. Arbeit in einer afrikanischen Gesell-schaft’’, in Kocka and Offe, Geschichte und Zukunft der Arbeit, pp. 175–193.15. Lis and Ehmer, ‘‘Introduction’’, p. 6.


the Global Collaboratory on the History of Labour Relations has aimed atsynchronic observation in order to achieve a more coherent approach.

A N E W C O N C E P T U A L I Z AT I O N O F G L O B A L

L A B O U R R E L AT I O N S

In the past decade a new and global approach to labour history has beendeveloped, stressing the global development of labour and labour relationsover a long time span. Global labour history as developed by the IISH is nota theory but a field of research. It concerns the history of all those peoplewho, through their work, have built our modern world – not only wagelabourers, but also chattel slaves, sharecroppers, housewives, the self-employed, and many other groups. It focuses on the labour relations of thesepeople, as individuals but also as members of households, networks, andother contexts. Global labour history covers the past five centuries and, inprinciple, all continents. It compares developments in several parts of theworld and attempts to reveal intercontinental connections and interactions.

To capture labour relations worldwide over a period of five centuries,labour needs to be defined broadly. Following Tilly and Tilly’s defini-tion,16 the Global Collaboratory project considers as work ‘‘any humanactivities adding use value to goods and services’’. This is a far moreencompassing concept than the ‘‘gainful workers’’ or ‘‘economicallyactive’’ that appear in the statistics of later eras, mostly starting from thenineteenth century, but compiled mainly for the twentieth. It takesaccount of the unpaid, mostly household-based labour of more or less allfamily members, including women and children, who are physically ableto work. It also comprises all types of labour relations, from slavery toindependent entrepreneurship and everything in between.

To systematize our approach, the members of the Collaboratory havedeveloped a taxonomy of labour relations, based on four large categories: thenon-working population and people either performing reciprocal, tributary,or commodified labour. These main categories focus on the target unit forwhat workers produce (be it goods or services); this can be either thehousehold or community, the state or the market. In principle, we canclassify the entire population using these main categories, which are sub-divided into categories based on the level of dependency and degree offreedom, or lack of it. Any classification must of course leave room forintermediary stages and combinations of labour relations. (For our tax-onomy of labour relations see Figure 1; for the definitions see Appendix.)

For a number of regions, sources of information are available on thelabour relations of at least part of the population in the early period,

16. Chris Tilly and Charles Tilly, Work under Capitalism (Boulder, CO, 1998), p. 22.


Cannot work or cannot be expected to work (1)

Affluent (2)

Unemployed (3)

Non-working

Kin producers (5)

Leading producers (4)

Household

Servants (6)

Community Redistribution agents (7)

Reciprocallabour

Forced labourers (8)

Indentured tributary labourers (9)

Tributary serfs (10)

Tributary slaves (11)

Tributarylabour

Commodifiedlabour

For non-marketinstitutions

For themarket

Sharecropping (18.1)

Piece-rate (18.2)

Time-rate (18.3)

Sharecropping (14.1)

Piece-rate (14.2)

Time-rate (14.3)

Working forproprietor (17.1)

For hire (17.2)

Wage earners (18)

Employers (13)

Self-employed (12)

Wage earners (14)

Indentured labourers (15)

Serfs (16)

Chattel slaves (17)

Figure 1. Taxonomy constructed by the Global Collaboratory on the History of LabourRelations. See Appendix for detailed descriptions.


1500–1650. However, our extrapolations and guestimates need to be con-firmed by qualitative data. Knowing how people valued different types ofwork and labour relations helps us to interpret the scarce numeric data. Inour search for perceptions of work, we wanted to look specifically at theconcepts of work held by the majority of people, most of whom in theperiod 1500–1650 were working in agriculture, housekeeping, or subsistencelabour but who have not left any written traces. This proved to be verydifficult, as there are few sources that yield information about the percep-tions of the workers themselves, and those that do exist are hard to date.However, the work people actually performed can tell us something abouttheir valuation of work. If images depict working women and children eventhough normative texts disapprove of such work, we can assume thatwomen worked if it was opportune and necessary to do so.

P E R S P E C T I V E S O N W O R K E T H I C S , N O R M S ,

VA L U AT I O N S , A N D I D E O L O G I E S

To further systematize our approach, we introduced a set of seven per-spectives to describe and analyse early modern work ethics. First, we askedthe authors to identify texts or other expressions and traditions that dealwith work ethics, norms, and valuations. Secondly, we wondered whetherchanges over time in the appreciation or disdain of work could be reflected insocio-linguistic perspectives. What terms and concepts were associated with‘‘work’’ and ‘‘worker’’? Thirdly, the authors were asked to ponder thequestion of the position of work and worker in society. In particular, howwas wage labour as a kind of commodified labour perceived in comparisonwith other labour relations? A fourth set of questions concerns free andunfree labour. It is included in the taxonomy but transcends the four maincategories since it occurs in reciprocal household labour, in tributary labourfor states and polities, and in market-based, commodified labour. Oneimportant perspective is therefore the valuation of free labour and thelegitimation of unfree labour. The fifth issue relates to the motives behindthe rankings of particular occupations. Criteria on the negative side includethe physical strain, or risks to life and health, associated with a specificoccupation, or the connection with death and decay. On the positive sideare particular skills (in part a social construction) or other qualifications,the income generated by the occupation, and its connection with luxuryproduction. The sixth question relates to who was allowed to do what work.What can we discover about divisions of labour relating to gender and age, toethnic and religious affiliations, or to belonging to particular families,lineages, or voluntary associations, such as guilds? The seventh and finalquestion concerns ideas about and approaches to realizing a ‘‘just’’ wage orother forms of remuneration.


W O R K E T H I C S I N T H E W O R L D , 1 5 0 0 – 1 6 5 0

In the history of norms and perceptions, 150 years may seem a short period,and we have often been asked why a period was chosen for our project’sinception in which acute change and expansionist activity can be found inwestern Europe while other regions might appear to have been more static orpassive. Different timeframes might be more meaningful for other worldregions. Nevertheless, being based in western Europe, we consider it legit-imate to start ‘‘digging where we stand’’, fully aware that different cognitivemaps are centred on other parts of the world and the periodicity of their riseto economic prosperity. A consideration of these differing timeframes must,indeed, form an integral part of this globally comparative exercise.

The first contribution to this volume, ‘‘Studying Attitudes to Work,Worldwide, 1500–1650: Concepts, Sources, and Problems of Interpreta-tion’’ by Marcel van der Linden, sets the Global Collaboratory’s approachin a broader methodological perspective that transcends the parts of theworld and periods covered elsewhere by the other contributors to thisvolume. It deliberates on concepts of work, work incentives, and workattitudes, explores possible source types and their problems, and identifiesproblems of interpretation. These may include the researcher’s projectionsof his or her expectations on to the available sources, or in false gen-eralizations. The remedy for such problems is careful source criticism,critical self-reflection, and the contextualization of the observations made.

The subsequent contributions are geographically ordered. We set outfrom the Netherlands, turning south and east, before finally arriving inPortuguese and Spanish America.

The essay by Ariadne Schmidt, ‘‘Labour Ideologies and Women in theNorthern Netherlands, c.1500–1800’’, discusses the meanings of work inProtestant, humanist, mercantilist, and Enlightenment thought as reflected inbooks on conduct and household management. She concludes that in all ofthese philosophies, labour was held in high esteem. Paintings and conductbooks of the period 1500–1650 present women working in the public sphere,as vendors and artisans for example, as unproblematic, though some of theconduct books emphasized that women should work at home.

Henk Looijesteijn’s essay ‘‘Between Sin and Salvation: The Seven-teenth-Century Dutch Artisan Pieter Plockhoy and his Ethics of Work’’analyses the philosophy of one individual seventeenth-century thinker.Plockhoy (c.1620–1664) conceived of a work and life balance in whicheverybody should work. Idleness was a sin, but work should leave enoughfree time for spiritual obligations. His ideal was a community engaged inreciprocal labour, producing surplus for the market in the outside world.Wage labour for the market was to be avoided.

In ‘‘Attitudes to Work and Commerce in the Late Italian Renaissance’’Luca Mocarelli compares two important late sixteenth-century writings


that discuss the occupations in Italian cities. Garzoni, an Augustinian monk,presents a scholarly study of urban occupations, in a work presumablyintended as a manual of instruction for a prince. Urban aristocrats at thattime were contemptuous of merchants, and we find criticism of merchants inGarzoni’s work. Fioravanti, the other author, was a gifted physician who leda restless life of travel and adventure and had probably seen with his owneyes much of what he described in his book. His intention, clearly, was todignify all the various types of craft and trade he had observed, withoutranking them as ‘‘noble’’ or ‘‘ignoble’’ as Garzoni does.

About fifty years later, by which time rural and urban proto-industryhad spread, merchant-manufacturers emerged and wage labour in themanufacturing sector gained in importance. In ‘‘The Just Wage in EarlyModern Italy’’ Andrea Caracausi shows that, at this point, a first sys-tematic attempt was made by Lanfranco Zacchia, a Roman jurist, toestablish legal norms on differentiated wage payment and other forms ofremuneration. Caracausi then compares the norms with the labour dis-putes also recorded by Zacchia. The need for codification demonstratedthe importance and the frequency of such disputes.

In an essay on Russia, ‘‘The Religious Aspect of Labour Ethics inMedieval and Early Modern Russia’’, Arkadiy Tarasov discusses theimpact of Orthodox Christianity on work ethics. As early as the secondhalf of the fourteenth century, a process of monastic colonization com-menced. The Russian Empire expanded far to the north and the east as thekhanates of the Mongolian Golden Horde and their successors declinedand disintegrated. The monasteries played a large role in the dissemina-tion of Russian culture and the Orthodox religion. The author stressesthat although the representatives of the Orthodox Church insisted on theimportance of work, it was never considered an aim in itself, intended foreconomic success, as was the case in Catholic monasteries in westernEurope. Instead, work was intended to advance spiritual development,and thus had a pedagogical rather than an economic function. This canalso be seen in the Domostroi, a rule book which intended to set out theprinciples of household management for prosperous urban families. It wascompiled in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and continued to enjoy awide circulation well into the nineteenth century.

Karin Hofmeester’s contribution, ‘‘Jewish Ethics and Women’s Work inthe Late Medieval and Early Modern Arab-Islamic World’’, presentsreligious ideals as the basis of work norms, a gendered division of labour,and social ranking, with special reference to Cairo between the thirteenthand seventeenth centuries. Paying special attention to the differencebetween text and social practice, she contrasts normative writings withlegal documents for more immediate use, such as marriage contracts,court records on divorce, and wills. The picture that emerges is one inwhich all women were expected to work and have an income, also – at least


in the ideal case – to allow their husbands some free time for contemplationand the study of religious texts. However, female activity had to bereconciled with the concept of zniut, or female modesty and restraint,which implied that women should have little contact with men and theoutside world, and not leave their homes too often. Hofmeester argues thaturbanization and the commercial revolution in the Arab-Islamic world ledto the rise of waged work, and work opportunities at homes increased,especially as the textile sector flourished.

Shireen Moosvi’s ‘‘The World of Labour in Mughal India (c.1500–1750)’’first introduces the dominant types of labour relations, stating that com-modified labour was fairly common in urban settings. Drawing on a varietyof sources, this study stresses the importance of an official account of theMughal Empire, the A’in-i Akbari by Abu’l-Fazl (c.1595). This record, whileacknowledging the usefulness of manual workers and peasants, nonethelesstransmitted a sense of superiority towards them. The Mughal emperor Akbar(reigned 1556–1605) was a famous exception to that rule, being purportednot only to have valued manual labour highly but also to have personallyundertaken several kinds of physical labour. In this contribution, we alsofind an approach to the actual voices of workers. The author presentsthem in the form of the religious songs composed by a group of manualworkers (cloth-dyers, weavers, and peasants) referred to as monotheists.They rejected both Islam and Hinduism and in their lyrics insisted on thedignity of their professions.

Focusing on one occupational group within the Mughal Empire, in hisarticle ‘‘Norms of Professional Excellence and Good Conduct inAccountancy Manuals of the Mughal Empire’’, Najaf Haider analyses onespecific type of source. Accountancy manuals were written by practitionersand conveyed a particular set of work ethics. Addressing the question of thedivision of labour and the entitlement to specific professions, the authorexplains that the change of language, calendar, and accounting system whichthe Mughal conquest engendered confronted Hindu clerks with competitionfrom Muslim specialists. With the help of these handbooks, in the course oftime Hindus too obtained the knowledge required to serve in the Mughalbureaucracy. This is reflected in the fact that the strict moral norms for thisprofession incorporated references to both Hindu and Muslim religiousrituals and concepts.

Christine Moll-Murata’s article, ‘‘Work Ethics and Work Valuations in aPeriod of Commercialization: Ming China, 1500–1644’’, gives an over-view of work ethics and how work was valued in another large centralizedempire. The traditional classification of the ruler’s subjects referred toscholar-officials, farmers, artisans, and merchants. The attitude of theofficial elite towards merchants was ambivalent, because merchants wereestablishing commercial networks that caused a mobility that seemed tothreaten the existing social order.


The voices of the great majority who worked in reciprocal and sub-sistence rural labour relations are heard much more rarely, though, andneed to be detected using indirect evidence. Lyrics and songs that can beconfidently dated to the period under observation are descriptive ratherthan self-expression. They concern mainly the urban trades and showgreat diversification.

In her essay ‘‘Prostitutes and Courtesans in the Confucian MoralUniverse of Late Ming China (1550–1644)’’, Harriet Zurndorfer demon-strates a shift in the value attached to the work of prostitutes and courtesansduring the last 100 years of the Ming dynasty and the transition to theManchu Qing. This shift affected the high-class courtesans rather than thelower-class prostitutes who worked in cheap brothels and remained insocially and legally more marginal circumstances. The courtesans were morehighly esteemed during the late Ming period. As the philosophical ideas ofthe Confucian philosopher Wang Yangming took root, the idea of individualself-cultivation and free expression of one’s emotions spread among theurban literati. The courtesans and their clients could regard themselves asenacting freedom, independence, and bravely overcoming the conventionalboundaries between the private and the public. This so-called ‘‘cult of theqing’’ (true feeling) gained popularity also among gentry women, who lived asecluded existence in their homes.

Turning to Japan, Regine Mathias portrays a rural society that experienceda change from predominantly reciprocal and tributary labour relations to thebeginnings of commodified labour. In ‘‘Japan in the Seventeenth Century:Labour Relations and Work Ethics’’, the author discusses the largelyunsuccessful attempts of the new political system to curb mobility andflexibility. Confucian scholars of the ‘‘School of the Heart’’ propagated ideasof the worthiness and equal value of all occupational ‘‘callings’’, even of themerchants. The concept of the ‘‘four occupational groups’’ had been adoptedfrom China, but it was less firmly rooted in Japan. Therefore, and because ofthe different relationships between the commercial sector and the bureau-cracy, the enhancement of the merchants’ role was less problematic. Mathiasalso evaluates the contribution of women to rural proto-industrial activity.These were most considerable in textile production. Women were notexpected to remain at home; they worked in the fields alongside the malemembers of their families.

The last group of articles in this volume treats labour relations andwork ethics in colonial settings in South America and the imposition ofunfree labour on Amerindian and Afro-American people. The essay byTarcisio Botelho, ‘‘Labour Ideologies and Labour Relations in ColonialPortuguese America, 1500–1700’’, discusses the justification for thedominant labour relation in the Brazilian sugar mills, the unfree com-modified labour forced upon the Afro-American slaves. The author setsthe ranking of occupations into the context of the medieval three estates


that applied in Portugal in the fifteenth century. The notions of the tri-partite European system of ‘‘those who pray’’, ‘‘those who fight’’, and‘‘those who labour’’ were at the root of Brazilian slavery, since the mastersof the sugar mills conceived of themselves as belonging to the noblerclasses, who were not expected to do manual work. In their sermons tothe African slaves in Brazil, the Jesuit missionaries argued that the slaveswere being held in captivity in order to save their souls, and their sufferingwas likened to the passion of Christ and defined as a punishment for theoriginal sin of mankind.

The second essay on South America, ‘‘Free and Unfree Labour in theColonial Andes in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries’’ by RaquelGil Montero, enquires into the nature of a particular kind of tributarylabour relation inflicted upon the native population living in the vicinityof Potosı, in present-day Bolivia, where large silver mines were beingoperated. It has been argued by historians of Latin America that theforced-labour obligations, the so-called mita, were a kind of voluntaryunfree labour. Closer analysis of colonial statistics and contemporaryreports reveals that some of the labourers were in fact going to the minesvoluntarily, in spite of the harsh working conditions there. While some ofthe natives were obliged to render service, others could pay monetarytribute. The wages for free labour were higher, and hence the tributescould be paid off sooner by working in the mines voluntarily. The Potosımita thus created a kind of dual system, where tributary and commodifiedlabour relations existed side by side.

G L O B A L C O N J U N C T I O N S A N D D I F F E R E N C E S

Between 1500 and 1650 most of the world’s population were unaware ofthe existence of other countries, let alone continents; nor could theycomprehend whether, or how, events abroad influenced their own life andwork. For some, however, being linked to a commercial circuit became anexperience that profoundly affected their existence.

In the period 1500–1650, European naval powers expanded eastwardand westward. Dutch and British ships arrived on North American shoresand those lands were settled, while the Portuguese and Spanish mon-archies declared parts of South and Central America their colonies. Therelationship of those colonies to Europe, from where powerful groupstried to transpose their values and work ethics on to the South Americanterritories, becomes clear not only in the essays on Brazil and Potosı butalso in that on Plockhoy, the Dutch practical visionary whose NorthAmerican settlement formed a testing ground for ideas on work devel-oped earlier in the Netherlands, England, and Ireland.

Early modern Europe was bound in a multitude of ways to the Med-iterranean. Important for our context are the connections between the


Spanish Reconquista, the Inquisition, and the exodus of Jews from Spain toother parts of Europe and the southern Mediterranean, including Cairo.

Further east, the conjunctions are also evident. By the thirteenth cen-tury, the Mongols had conquered and were ruling an enormous empire.As Mongol rule disintegrated, the Russian Tsars extended their territoryin the second half of the sixteenth century to include Siberia. One des-cendant of the Timurid Mongolians struck out southward and conqueredIndia. Still further east, the Ming dynasty had forced the last emperor ofthe Mongol Yuan dynasty to flee north, but the Mongol threat persistedthroughout the Ming. Japan remained unaffected by direct Mongolianinfluence, but the circle closes when we consider the eastern expansion ofthe Portuguese and Dutch East India companies, which reached India,China, and Japan in the sixteenth century. Some of the articles in thisvolume show how labour systems and work ethics were affected as ideasand commodities travelled along those routes. It is in this global andspatial setting that the articles investigate the layers and perspectives ofwork ethics and valuation of work.

The sources for our historical enquiries are texts, and to a certain extentimages too. The most desirable and straightforward type of text foranalysing the voices of those who actually worked, their self-valuations,and their attitude towards their work, would seem to be autobiographicalego documents. However, such documents are completely lacking in oursamples. In fact, even for European regions where they do exist, theyoften do not express attitudes towards work. By way of explanation,James S. Amelang argues that ‘‘self-writing was a practice different from,and even alien to work’’, a contention that accords with James Farr’sobservation that ‘‘early modern artisans were indifferent or even hostile towork’’.17 In the samples of workers’ voices we have in this volume, theIndian weaver’s song and the Indian handbook written by clerks for clerks,the former stands in close relation to the religious elevation of work, and thus‘‘lifts the curse’’ by likening craftwork with divine creation. The other tellsprofessionals the secrets of the trade, and advises them on how to behave inprivate life. It is thus normative rather than descriptive.

In sum, for several reasons the voice of workers is difficult to discernfor periods when work was not yet an isolated feature for all or mostpeople. The case of the utopian thinker, Plockhoy, is special since he, as anartisan, still tried to set norms rather than describe actual conditions. Yet,implicitly, his work contrasts the situation in his utopian society withactual labour relations, showing how Plockhoy despised the position ofwage workers outside his society. The other articles also give us hints.

17. James S. Amelang, ‘‘Lifting the Curse: or Why Early Modern Worker Autobiographers DidNot Write about Work’’, in Ehmer and Lis, The Idea of Work, pp. 91–100, 97.


Even though work songs from China and Japan are difficult to date, they stilltell us something about the valuation of physical labour. The Jewish womenin late medieval Cairo who went to the Islamic court to fight for the right tokeep their own earnings demonstrate that many Jewish women worked foran income, that they valued this, and regarded it as their property.

This meant that, if possible, people made deliberate choices, andthese reflect their valuation of work. The article by Raquel Gil Monterosuggests that people sometimes opted for harsh working conditions in themines, performing free, monetized labour in order to pay off tributes, ratherthan rendering labour service. The Chinese upper-class ladies who copied thelifestyle of courtesans show how the ladies of high society valued a position offreedom and independence. The Italian men, women, and children who wentto court to sue for ‘‘just wages’’ not only prove that wage labour had becomea widespread, institutionalized, and accepted form of labour in RenaissanceItaly, their litigation also demonstrates that workers regarded their labour assubject to an inviolable contract between worker and employer.

Texts created by secular or clerical authorities are obvious sources ofinformation on work ethics and on how work was valued; thus legal orreligious norms and regulations can be found for most of the regions studied.Apart from canonical texts, we find in all societies conduct books forcloisters, households, ideal societies such as Plockhoy’s, real societies such asItalian cities, and greater regions and spheres of power, such as empires.

Rather than describing the actual situation, they represent modelsituations. These texts were often written in periods of change and dic-tated rules of work that were not, or no longer, in accordance with socialpractice. Examples include the development of market economies and therole of the merchant class, so detested by Plockhoy, Zacchia, and others,and suspected by Chinese officials such as Zhang Han; the proliferation offree wage labour, which Garzoni would have preferred to ban; and theincrease in women’s work outside the home, of which different types ofDutch conduct books as well as rabbinical writings did not approve.Sometimes, those texts were intended to provide proper guidelines forthe new situation, such as Fioravanti’s rules on proper wages, or to informthe public or administrators of new work specializations, such as theChinese and Japanese agricultural handbooks which also commented onthe gendered division of labour. Directly or indirectly, they reflected theactual situation and tried to set norms for achieving an ideal situation.

Since Le Goff, historians of work have paid particular attention to the timefactor in changes of work organization. In many of the societies describedhere, wage labour increased, and it was formalized in contracts, in whichtime played an important role. However, in the cases presented here, time isnot always mentioned in relation to work contracts. Also, Dutch householdmanagement books show that reciprocal work and unfree labour withinthe household continued. The standard contract for the sale of daughters in


the Chinese household encyclopaedia does not mention a period of com-mitment, and the rules in the Russian Domostroi suggest that the lady of thehouse should always be ready to give orders to her servants and be preparedto work herself. Apparently, texts not only described ideal situations inresponse to changing labour relations, they also signalled continuities, suchas the never-ending phenomenon of non-wage labour, which was oftenperformed by women.

Concerning the expression of work and the value attributed to it, inalmost all the societies treated in this volume we found texts that valor-ized ‘‘work’’. Often ‘‘work’’ was esteemed as an abstract concept, asopposed to idleness. Female idleness seemed particularly harmful. Theterms labor/labour/lavoro, Arbeit, travail/trabalho in the Europeancontext, but also lao/ro in China and Japan, were associated with ‘‘pain’’until the early modern period. In Indo-Persian, this conjunction canalso be found in the common designation for labour, the Persianwords mahnat (literally ‘‘pain’’) and ranj (literally ‘‘grief, pain, toil’’).18

Since Max Weber, the idea that in the sixteenth century work was not onlydivine retribution for the original sin of mankind, but also a divine ‘‘calling’’,has often been pointed out. Likewise, in Japanese, a seventeenth-centuryterm for work also implies ‘‘heavenly calling’’ (tenshoku). However, if workwas held in higher esteem from 1500 onward – some scholars stress acontinuity that included the period prior to 1500 – did this also imply thatit was a ‘‘joy’’, and that the accumulation of recompense for work, whichMax Weber ascribed to the ‘‘Protestant ethic’’, was an ultimate goal?19

The articles in this volume do not give a consonant answer to thisquestion. Work in the Brazilian sugar mills needed to be justified by referenceto the original sin of mankind, and other oppressive work conditions – thatstressed the pain rather than the joy of work – are discussed in this volume.The occupational specializations analysed in works such as those by Garzoniand Fioravanti, or in Chen Duo’s songs on urban occupations, which mightpotentially express the joy of work, could have been due to the interest andpride of the elites or middling classes in an affluent and sophisticated envir-onment. The attractive features of the rice-planting women in Japanese fieldswere praised in an agricultural treatise. This is the onlookers’ perspective,which may have been joyful and entertaining. Some of the images of people atwork in this volume were designed to satisfy this interest or to suggest joy inthe work of others and to convey the message of harmonious labour relations.

Many religions promise metaphysical rewards for a life of hard workand punishment for a life spent in idleness, or, as in the Christian case, claim

18. This was pointed out by Shireen Moosvi in her presentation at the workshop.19. See the contribution by Marcel van der Linden in this volume, and Lis and Ehmer,‘‘Introduction’’, p. 16, for a discussion of 1500 as a turning point, and p. 17 for a critique of MaxWeber’s thesis of the connection between the Protestant work ethic and the ‘‘spirit of capitalism’’.


that the strain of work was the redemption for man’s original sin. However,all religious ethical systems also insist on the importance of spiritualengagement, and demand that sufficient time be reserved for contemplationin everyday life. Between 1500 and 1650, activity and contemplation formedan indissoluble bond, as far as the religious authorities studied in thisvolume – Christian (Protestant, Catholic, Orthodox), Jewish, Muslim, Indianmonotheist, Confucian, and Buddhist – are concerned. The time spent onnon-working activities (i.e. on not adding use value to goods and services)was, from these religious perspectives, at least as joyful as the time spent onwork, though often this was not made explicit.

In many of the regions discussed in this Special Issue, we see the con-sequences of rapidly developing transcontinental markets, including urbani-zation and the development of free wage labour. In the Dutch Republic andthe cities of Italy and China we see a shift from combined reciprocal and self-employed artisan labour to more commodified labour. The contributions alsodemonstrate shifts from slave labour (Arab-Islamic north Africa), serfdom,and indentured labour (Japan) to free wage labour. In India commodifiedlabour seems to have already been widespread by the end of the sixteenthcentury, so here the major shift might have taken place before 1500.

The growing extent of free wage labour in western Europe and Asiacoincided with a shift from reciprocal labour to slavery in the Spanish andPortuguese colonial empires. This leads to one of the core questionsaddressed by this Special Issue. Was commodified labour valued differ-ently from other forms of labour relations, and did the increase in wagelabour prompt an increase in the discourse on labour?

The answer is ambiguous. We see in the work of Garzoni and Plockhoya true distaste for wage labour. Garzoni, writing for aristocrats keen topreserve the social hierarchy, had a special reason for that. Plockhoydespised the position of wage workers as they had to sell their labour tothe abject class of merchants. Reciprocal labour was his ideal. In Chinesecities, the freedom and independence of wage labour (as compared withindentured labour) was clearly valued, since we see people movingvoluntarily in that direction, just like workers in Japan, where rulers firsttried to prevent geographical and occupational mobility.

Once commodified wage labour led to new thinking and conflictsregarding contracts, hours of work, and other aspects of labour relations,it automatically triggered greater discourse on labour. Also, the growingnumber of women working for wages (sometimes outside the home, andsometimes wanting to keep their own income) led to debates concerningthe nature of work. At the same time, we must remember that both inrural areas and within cities reciprocal labour was still very much thenorm. In Brazil, the shift from reciprocal or tributary labour to slaveryalso led to a ‘‘labour discourse’’, if we can term as discourse the justifi-cations adduced by Jesuit missionaries in their sermons.


Many of the studies in this volume show the fluidity of the categories‘‘free’’ and ‘‘unfree’’ labour. This is clearest in the article on forced labourin Potosı, where free and the unfree workers all ended up working in thesame mine. Yet the ability to meet one’s labour obligations by payment ofa monetary tribute could mean the difference between life and death,which is why local people insisted on the option of paying tribute ratherthan rendering labour service.

The article on Brazil discusses the shift from first enslaving part of theIndian population, to resorting to Afro-American enslavement for securinga supply of labour in the sugar mills after the demographic decline in the1560s. The Portuguese also established a different kind of less unfree workorganization, which involved organizing those Indians who worked for thePortuguese and were subject to reciprocal labour, into hamlets controlled byreligious orders, mainly Jesuits. The shift here occurred from one ethnicgroup to the other, and saw labour relations among the Indians beingtransformed from outright slavery to life and work under Portuguese control.

In some cases in China voluntary bonded labour arrangements could beentered into on a temporary basis. In China, as in Japan, the boundarybetween unfree service to an upper-class landowner or feudal lord andfree labour arrangements could be transgressed if a serf proved able to buyhis own land and freedom. A less costly status which also involved lessfreedom for the former serf or bondservant was tenancy, with the tenantleasing from his former master. Finally, the unfree labour undertaken byprostitutes could be transformed into concubinage, thus changing thetype of labour relation into that of reciprocal household work.

In all the societies discussed here, whether Protestant, Catholic,Orthodox Christian, Perso-Islamic, Jewish, or Confucian, occupationswere ranked according to specific criteria. These were hierarchical sys-tems of orders, estates, or castes in which manual labour was foundmostly at the bottom, the exception being the ‘‘four occupational groups’’of China and Japan, where farmers were allocated to the two upperclasses. Intellectuals and clergy were generally found at the top, unlessthey belonged to orders that were – in theory – viewed with suspicion bythe state, such as Daoists and Buddhists in China.

As the articles show, in practice those rankings were not fixed and rigid;they were sometimes reconsidered, and could be revised over time, especiallywhen people, commodities, and ideas began to circulate. The Persian rankingfound in Mughal India gave precedence to warriors, followed by artisans andmerchants, while men of letters occupied a third category and clerics werenot included at all. This contrasted with the previous Hindu orders, whichcategorized people as priests, rulers and warriors, traders, or manual workers,with a residual category of menial workers and outcastes.

In China, change also occurred within the group of menial labourers.For almost a century the better-off prostitutes achieved a kind of glamorous


and heroic image, as external trade expanded, cities flourished, and a cosmo-politan lifestyle formed a fertile breeding ground for the development oftheories of individual morals. Another example is the notion of the medievalEuropean three estates exported from Portugal to Brazil: in the colony,merchants became nobles, moving from the third to the second estate.As flexible as these taxonomies might have been, people still definedthemselves and were defined by others in terms of their work, as TarcisioBotelho has shown.

In the period between 1500 and 1650, access to work was not free toeverybody. Various criteria for inclusion in or exclusion from particularsectors of production and services applied. The most important weregender, ethnicity, hereditary occupation, as with the castes, and regionof origin.

Almost all the essays in this volume show gender to have beenimportant. In many contexts the main argument was that women shouldwork in the home, and in emerging proto-industrial or commercializingsettings that they should also work in their homes for the market.Domesticity was an ideal in normative texts in the Netherlands, Cairo,and China. For the Dutch Republic, it has already been argued that theaffluence gained through overseas trade enabled Dutch men to work as thefamily’s sole breadwinner and women to confine themselves to householdwork. However, as Ariadne Schmidt shows, this change did not take rootuntil the eighteenth century. Evidence more empirically valid than conductbooks and philosophical reasoning suggests that, in reality, women did workoutside the home, though to a variable extent. It is interesting to note thatJapanese female farmers were expected to transplant rice seedlings, while thiswas not always the case in China; and that Jewish women in Cairo whooriginated from the Iberian peninsula had more chances to engage in income-generating domestic production, and more possibilities to make decisionsconcerning their own property, but less opportunity to go out in public.

Indian women worked both in their own homes and outside. ShireenMoosvi reminds us that even in market economies most women’s labourwas reciprocal, and women would assist their male family membersif they worked at home. Women went outside the home, and evento construction sites, to work as porters. There was little competitionbetween women and men for most occupations, which again shows thatgender was an important criterion for inclusion in or exclusion fromparticular occupations. For India, occupational restrictions largely affectedthe castes of Hindu communities, which were endogamous and had parti-cular occupations allocated to them. Although the caste system changed overtime, the scope it allowed for horizontal or vertical mobility remainedlimited. Hereditary occupations were also a feature of the Chinese systemof labour obligations. Military, artisan, and salt-producing householdsin particular were obliged to serve the state in particular roles. However,


after 1500 this system was replaced largely by monetary tax payments, atendency which led to greater flexibility on the labour market.

Ethnicity was another important criterion determining who could dowhat work. This is explained for the unfree labour conditions of Afro-Americans and Indians in Brazil, and the Indian native population ofPotosı, the most striking samples in this volume. Yet cases of a morelimited range in which people of a particular descent were forced orentitled to work in specific occupations can be found all over the globe.At one end, for instance, we find among China’s ‘‘official prostitutes’’ thedescendants of Mongols who had remained in China after the defeat ofthe Mongol Yuan dynasty. At the other, after 1644, Manchus, Mongols,and their bondservants, the so-called ‘‘banner people’’, occupied all thetop-level military and administrative offices in the Qing empire followingthe demise of the Ming dynasty. Within those extremes, descent andnetworks played key roles in the commercializing and mobile earlymodern world. From Europe there are examples of porters working inMilan, most of whom were of Swiss origin,20 and of Scottish mercenariesin the armies of the Netherlands during the Dutch Revolt and in Danishand Swedish armies during the Thirty Years War.21

Although some of the source types presented in this volume, such asbooks of household management, can be found almost everywhere, otherswere particular to specific regions. Those include Zacchia’s codification ofwage-related law, and the collection of guild adjudications in labour conflicts.The Italian wage codifications and the role of corporations in labour-relatedadjudication are paralleled by the guild institutions of the Arab and Ottomanworld.22 Yet the systematic focus on wage jurisdiction is extraordinary andmust be attributed both to a specific legal tradition as well as to theimportance of wage labour and wage disputes in Renaissance Italy.

T O C O N C L U D E

In many countries, the study of early modern labour relations is still in itsinfancy. For a number of countries then this Special Issue provides amuch-needed overview of developments in labour relations, one whichalso discusses what we know at this point about how labour and labourrelations were perceived.

20. Luca Mocarelli, ‘‘The Attitude of Milanese Society to Work and Commercial Activities:The Case of the Porters and the Case of the Elites’’, in Ehmer and Lis, The Idea of Work,pp. 101–121, 109–111.21. James Miller, Swords for Hire (Edinburgh, 2007).22. Information from Nora Lafi, ‘‘The Historical Study of Labour Relations in the OttomanMiddle-East: Sources and Questionings: 1500, 1650, 1800, 1900’’, unpublished conference paperfor the Ottoman Workshop of the Global Collaboratory on the History of Labour Relations,March 2009.


Work ethics and the valuation of work in what for some regions isregarded as the ‘‘early modern’’ period, in others, such as Mughal Indiaand the Arab-Islamic world, as ‘‘late medieval’’, do not converge into asingle trend. On the basis of this inventory, we can conclude that whilepeasant self-subsistence was still the rule in most regions, commodifiedlabour increased in the cities of Europe and South and East Asia, and alsoin the colonial empires of South America, varying from free wage labourto chattel slavery. This was the result of what today is perceived of as thebeginning of globalization, which linked previously unrelated worldregions through relationships of trade and often also exploitation.

The voice of the elite concerning the change in the lives of those whoworked is anxious in some cases, but full of marvel at the diversity ofoccupations in others. The traces of the opinions of the working non-elitesabout their lot are faint, but we find self-assertion in some cases, and astruggle (or the conviction that one should struggle) for more control overthe labour process and its remuneration in others.

The period 1500–1650 was one where the dichotomy of activity andcontemplation, or self-fulfilment, and in some cases redemption throughwork, played a central role in work ethics. Labour relations and occu-pations determined social stratification and vice versa. Kings hardlyever engaged in physical work, while housewives always did. Those inbetween, if their voices can be made audible, would object to the hard-ships of work, but occasionally find ways to enjoy it. Changes in workand labour relations could imply greater freedom and bargaining options,but at the same time an infringement on personal choices and preferences,engendering joy for some and pain for others in all the world regionsrepresented in this volume.


Appendix

D E F I N I T I O N S O F L A B O U R R E L AT I O N S

Non-working

1. Cannot work or cannot be expected to work: Those who cannot work,because they are too young (r6 years), too old (Z75 years),1 disabled,or are studying.

2. Affluent: Those who are so prosperous that they do not need to workfor a living (rentiers, etc.).

3. Unemployed: Though unemployment is very much a nineteenth- and,especially, twentieth-century concept, we distinguish between those inemployment and those wishing to work but who cannot find employment.

Working

RECIPROCAL LABOUR

Within the household:

4. Leading household producers: Heads of self-sufficient households (theseinclude family-based and non-kin-based forms, such as monasteries andpalaces). In many households after 1500, ‘‘self-sufficiency’’ can no longerhave been complete. Basic foodstuffs, such as salt, and materials for toolsand weapons, such as iron, were acquired through barter or monetarytransactions even in tribal societies that were only marginally exposedto market production.2 ’’Self-sufficiency’’ in our sense, which occurs inlabour relations 4, 5, and 6, can include small-scale market transactionsthat aim at sustaining households rather than accumulating capital byway of profiting from exchange value.3

5. Household kin producers: Subordinate kin (men, women, and children)contributing to the maintenance of households.

6. Household servants: Subordinate kin and non-kin (men, women, andchildren) contributing to the maintenance of households. This category

1. These minimum and maximum ages are very much culturally determined and can differ forcertain regions or cross-sections.2. According to Amalendu Guha, ‘‘The Medieval Economy of Assam’’, in Tapan Raychaudhuriand Irfan Habib (eds), The Cambridge Economic History of India (Cambridge, 1982), I, p. 487,‘‘village self-sufficiency in a total sense was a myth’’, even for the relatively remote sixteenth-and seventeenth-century Assam.3. Marcel van der Linden, ‘‘Global Labour History and ‘the Modern World-System’’’, Inter-national Review of Social History, 46 (2001), pp. 423–459, 452, referring to G.A. Cohen, KarlMarx’s Theory of History: A Defence (Oxford, 1978).


does not refer to household servants who earn a salary and are free to leavetheir employer of their own volition, but rather to servants in feudalautarchic households.

Within the community:

7. Community-based redistribution agents: Persons who perform tasksfor the local community in exchange for communally providedremuneration in kind, such as food, accommodation, and services, ora plot of land and seed to grow food on their own. Examples of thistype of labour include working under the Indian jajmani system,hunting and defence by Taiwanese aborigines, or communal work innomadic and sedentary tribes in the Middle East and North Africa.

TRIBUTARY LABOUR

8. Forced labourers: Those who have to work for the polity, and areremunerated mainly in kind. They include corvee labourers,conscripted soldiers and sailors, and convicts.

9. Indentured tributary labourers: Those contracted to work as unfreelabourers for the polity for a specific period of time to pay off a debt.For example, German regiments (the ‘‘Hessians’’) in service with theBritish Empire which fought against the American colonists duringthe American Revolutionary War.

10. Tributary serfs: Those working for the polity because they are boundto its soil and obliged to provide specified tasks for a specifiedmaximum number of days, for example, state serfs in Russia.

11. Tributary slaves: Those who are owned by and work for the polityindefinitely (deprived of the right to leave, to refuse to work, or toreceive compensation for their labour). One example is forcedlabourers in concentration camps.

COMMODIFIED LABOUR

For the market, private employment:

12. Self-employed: Those who produce goods or services for marketinstitutions, possibly in cooperation with other household membersor no more than three wage labourers, apprentices, serfs, or slaves (forexample, peasants, craftsmen, petty traders, transporters, as well asthose in a profession).

13. Employers: Those who produce goods or services for marketinstitutions by employing more than three wage labourers, inden-tured labourers, serfs, or slaves.


14. Market wage earners: Wage earners who produce commodities orservices for the market in exchange mainly for monetary remuneration.14.1. Sharecropping wage earners: Remuneration is a fixed share oftotal output (including the temporarily unemployed).14.2. Piece-rate wage earners: Remuneration at piece rates (includingthe temporarily unemployed).14.3. Time-rate wage earners: Remuneration at time rates (includingthe temporarily unemployed).

15. Indentured labourers for the market: Those contracted to work asunfree labourers for an employer for a specific period of time to payoff a debt. They include indentured labourers in the British Empireafter the abolition of slavery.

16. Serfs working for the market: Those bound to the soil and obliged toprovide specified tasks for a specified maximum number of days, forexample, serfs working on the estates of the nobility.

17. Chattel slaves who produce for the market: Those owned by theiremployers (masters). They are deprived of the right to leave, to refuseto work, or to receive compensation for their labour.17.1. Sharecropping chattel slaves working for their proprietor, forexample, plantation slaves working in the Caribbean.17.2. Slaves for hire, for example, for agricultural or domestic labourin eighteenth-century Virginia.

For non-market institutions that may produce for the market:

18. Wage earners employed by non-market institutions: Such as the state,state-owned companies, the Church, or production cooperatives, whoproduce or render services for a free or a regulated market.18.1. Sharecropping wage earners: Remuneration is a fixed share oftotal output (including the temporarily unemployed).18.2. Piece-rate wage earners: Remuneration at piece rates (includingthe temporarily unemployed), e.g. hired artisans in Chinese imperialsilk weaveries during the Ming and Qing dynasties.18.3. Time-rate wage earners: Remuneration at time rates (includingthe temporarily unemployed), e.g. hired artisans on Chinese imperialconstruction projects during the Ming and Qing dynasties, but alsoworkers and employees in twentieth-century state enterprises.


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